By Ning Chang
"Peppermint Candy," Lee Chang-dong’s sophomore feature after his wildly successful debut, "Green Fish," starts with the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
An idyllic picnic reunion turns into the site of tragedy when the turbulent and troubled Yongho (Sol Kyung-gu) stumbles in, wailing plaintive karaoke about heartbreak and throwing himself fully dressed into the river, kicking up silt and watching it run downstream. In the end, he climbs up onto the tracks while his former friends dance on, and shouts into an oncoming train, “I want to go back!”
So the film starts at the end. It’s a masterful character study capturing a moment of collapse, launching us into a reverse chronology of Yongho’s past and revealing more about this jaded, calcified and violent man. Lee subsumes this narrative within the broader context of societal collapse, as he excavates the past twenty years of South Korea’s autocracy. Throughout, interspersed by the quiet, rhythmic chugging of the train scouring through the countryside in reverse, Lee guides the audience to find the crossroads at which Yongho, and by extension the nation, went awry to the point where renewal only comes with self-destruction.
The image of the train conjures Marx’s metaphor of history’s locomotive and the political and economic revolutions that dog the narrative. These sweeping changes persist throughout the film, hovering in the background; there’s the unexplained practice of drunken military orders, an incoherent news broadcast, and other contextual clues about the social landscape that seep into Yongho’s personal narrative.
Yet the film never condescends to the viewer to explain in detail these great shifts that catalyze Yongho’s phases of life; Lee just signals these crossings, maintaining the temporal distance while dog-earring the page for the audience, a piercing train whistle cutting through the noise to remind us of the future that is rapidly catching up.
I would contend that an unfamiliarity with the history at play doesn’t undermine the skill of Lee and the grueling emotive talent of actor Sol Kyung-gu, who immerses us in the unraveling of a man caught in a society racing ahead at a blistering pace. Trapped by the past, crushed under the wheels of this locomotive of history, Yongho’s life is excavated by Lee with the eye of a filmmaker-as-forensic-sociologist.
Yongho is unquestionably a product of his society, one that molds his masculinity through a culture of militarism, silence and violence that aligns him with the state. While we first meet him as a penniless and suicidal shadow of his former self, we quickly see the heights from which he has fallen. As a casually abusive and adulterous husband, father and businessman, he employs the daily violence of a seasoned police veteran, feeling that his intimidation is disciplinary and his hypocritical actions excused.
He moves through life like a shark, dissociated from those around him even when he’s fighting, arguing or cheating on his wife. The glimmer of recognition that sparks him out of his state of numbness is a restaurant scene, running into a figure of his past that he confronts in the men’s restroom with a smug “life is beautiful,” which could be read as both a statement and a question.
Lee’s film slowly strips away the facade to reveal Yongho as a cop in the 80s, torturing the same man for information on student protests, the 1987 June Uprising that paved the way for a democratic South Korea. As a rookie cop cracking down on trade unionists in 1982, he is introduced to this practice of police brutality reluctantly, then horrifically, trying to scrub the smell of feces off his hands. If anything the film is about Yongho finding it impossible to get rid of the metaphorical “smell” of committing violence, lashing out against the people around him who care while his colleagues cheerfully tell him to “get used to it.” His role in the military’s crackdown during the 1980 Gwangju Uprising haunts him.
The penultimate chapter of the film felt the most masterful – the hinge in which Lee establishes a “before” and an “after.” Yongho hunches in the shadow of a train depot, wounded by friendly fire, alone even as part of a military contingent, and accidentally kills a civilian student in his effort to save her while saving himself. Is there a more apt metaphor for the youth churned through by the dictatorship? Under Lee’s direction, Sol’s performance of quiet, desperate fear transforms into a picture of the atomized individual, at once cut off from the social bonds that give him meaning and severed from his inner self.
Twenty years before Yongho steps in front of a train, we see the same riverbank, the young friends, the same song he wails drunkenly in 1999 instead sung with feeling by a group in 1972. The Proustian cycle feels complete, and Yongho twenty years ago almost seems to sense the gravitational tug of his embarkation on this journey, holding in his hands the fragile wildflowers of spring and a melting piece of peppermint candy while the train rumbles by.
Lee’s direction has a wounded and fateful quality. In the 4K restoration, it reads almost elegiacally, searching for a sense of youthful promise and idealism lost along the long journey. Doing a story in reverse chronology is always difficult, especially doing so in a way that doesn’t hold your metaphorical hand throughout.
Yet, littered with unforgettable moments of fractured violence and bruised innocence, Lee crafts a compelling, passionate film about how South Korea got to the turn of the millennium, searching for these character-and-nation-defining crossroads of the past century that hopefully pave the way for learning from mistakes, escaping the cycles and embracing renewal.
